Capture More Customers With Chatbot Software That Acts as a Digital Receptionist

From Our Partners at Agentz

The typical small business spends between 10 to 20% of its revenue on marketing to drive inbound traffic to their website and calls to their business. Too often though, SMBs don’t take full advantage of this traffic and miss upwards of one-third of their calls due to lack of support during the off-hours or because they don’t answer their phone fast enough. In a world where 78%* of customers buy from the company that responds to them first, even just a 10% missed call rate can impact your bottom line as a business owner.

Along with more rapid response times and email automation, live website chatbot software is one of the top ways to tourniquet the bleeding of leads. It’s worth looking into this type of software to help you capture more customers.

One such chatbot is the AI-driven Agentz digital receptionist. Agentz helps solve the ‘white space’ gap between when traffic hits a website and when a lead is nurtured by the business. By engaging with website visitors immediately, the Agentz digital receptionist draws the customer into a conversation with the goal of answering their pressing questions quickly and, ultimately, capturing a lead or satisfying existing customers.

Working for your business 24/7, the digital receptionist not only engages your website visitors but also responds to any missed calls throughout the day. By sending an SMS text to customers when their calls go unanswered, the digital receptionist acknowledges their call and assures them they are not being ignored. Simultaneously, the business is alerted allowing them to respond quickly to the customer via text, giving them a greater likelihood of capturing that customer.

The greatest benefit that Agentz users enjoy? According to co-founder Ketan Shah, “Our users take advantage of not just what we believe is industry-leading user engagement via the chatbot, but also the missed call handling. By allowing the digital receptionist to react when a call is missed, the business can respond faster and capture that prospect in those precious minutes when the caller is most likely to become a customer. Our mission is to ensure that the small business owner never misses out on another customer.”

Measuring Chatbot User Engagement

Chatbots are a good source of data for businesses, educating them on how users engage with their website as well as what their website visitors are seeking. Rich data includes how and when users engage with the digital receptionist as well as the types of questions being keyed in. These are things that can help a business improve its website content and support customers during off-hours.

“We have some customers that update their website content based on the questions that come through the chatbot and others that leverage the chatbot window customization capabilities to message things like their COVID hours of operation, special offers or any other timely news,” says Agentz Head of Channel Partnerships, Kerry Baldwin. “Others leverage the chatbot conversation transcripts for their SEO strategy and others customize the conversation flows to drive things like customer Google reviews. We’ve seen some really intelligent usage from our customer base.”

Baldwin added, “Most users are surprised at the level of engagement that website visitors have with the digital receptionist. The biggest eureka moment is when they view their dashboard reports and see the level of engagement after hours as well as the number of missed calls handled. These are customers that most likely would have been lost otherwise.”

On average, Agentz users can expect to experience:

• 1/3 of website visitors engage with the digital receptionist.
• 1/3 of engagements are after hours.
• 1/4 of website visitors who engage with the digital receptionist convert to a contact or appointment.

These results show that customers are very willing to engage with a chatbot and, in fact, according to research by businessinsider.com, 45% of customers prefer to use chatbots as their primary mode of communication with businesses. “What may once have been considered an impersonal mode of communication between business and customer has proven to be more convenient and highly effective,” says Baldwin.

What to Consider When Evaluating Chatbot Software
Once you have decided to explore chatbots for your business or are looking to upgrade to a more comprehensive solution, there are a few considerations to keep in mind.

Does the chatbot require a human to manage chat interactions?
Chat has evolved significantly. Early solutions required a person on the business end to chat with the customer in real-time. The drawback to these solutions is that they require somebody to handle the chat sessions which most SMBs are unable to do successfully. Hiring outsourced staff is an option but, for many, a cost-prohibitive one.

There is also the customer experience to consider. Oftentimes, customers are blindly waiting for a response to their chat message which could take many minutes to arrive, in the worst-case scenarios, never does. Customer expectations are high when chat is presented because, in theory, response via chat should be near-immediate.

Chat solutions such as the Agentz digital receptionist offer an experience that enables customers to have many of their questions answered in real-time as well as capture those all-important business leads. By using AI-driven technology and intelligent conversation flows, the digital receptionist provides a superior experience for customers while reducing the need for business staff to handle chats live. But what if the business wants to manage live chat? The Agentz digital receptionist offers that as well – it’s up to the business how they prefer to set up their installation.

Does the chatbot engage the website visitor?
Most chatbots act as simple contact forms and don’t engage with the customer. The Agentz digital receptionist, on the other hand, doesn’t just sit quietly waiting for a prospect to raise their hand. It’s like a shop greeter asking “How can I help you?” when you walk into a store and start browsing. The software uses intelligent conversation flows to engage website visitors, answer their questions and drive them towards specific outcomes such as scheduling appointments and capturing customer intent along with contact information. This enables the digital receptionist to produce higher-quality leads over simple contact forms.

Does the chatbot have a pre-trained knowledge base to answer basic business and industry-specific questions?
The ability to intelligently answer a customer’s question without requiring live human intervention is key to an efficient chatbot experience. Answering basic business questions such as “What are your hours of operation? or “What forms of payment do you accept?” helps ease the workload of your staff while answering customer questions quickly.

Agentz takes the typical chatbot a step further by giving access to a pre-trained industry-specific knowledge base to handle a myriad of customer inquiries. Questions like “Do you offer standing seam metal roofing?” or “What types of dental insurance do you accept?” allow the digital receptionist to respond to commonly asked questions by industry.

Plus, your unique knowledge base continually improves. As the digital receptionist gathers data on how customers interact with it, continual learning takes place. This leads to a continually-improved visitor experience and more customer acquisitions.

Does the chatbot integrate with your phone system to handle missed calls?
Most chatbots solve one problem – interacting with website visitors. More sophisticated solutions; however, think holistically about the customer journey and how businesses can better convert inbound call traffic. By handling missed calls, the 24/7 always-on Agentz digital receptionist works as a true back-up plan to your own staff.

Don’t get sidetracked by text-only solutions!
Text-only solutions that appear in the form of a chat window only solve one problem. While they allow customers to reach out to you and for you to text them back in real-time, that requires you to respond to every inquiry. An omnichannel solution such as the Agentz digital receptionist combines the power of true self-serve customer capabilities such as AI-powered answering of questions and appointment scheduling along with lead capture, missed call handling and text conversations. This allows you to communicate with and serve your customers in the way that they prefer.

How easy is it to set up?
The Agentz digital receptionist is designed with simplicity in mind. The easy setup process walks business owners through creating their profile, choosing appropriate knowledge base questions and answers, branding the chatbot software to match their website look and feel and adding the easy JavaScript code pixel to the website. Designed to be set up and installed in minutes, the Agentz digital receptionist provides the most robust feature set for the SMB.

“At the end of the day, we want to help the small business owner be successful,” says Shah. “The Agentz Digital Receptionist was designed with the SMB in mind knowing that they frequently have to juggle many tasks throughout the day, especially during COVID challenges. Having an automated tool that provides superior backup support is a real need. Our goal is to always be the most affordable, industry-leading solution for SMBs in a market that frequently caters to enterprise-level companies and offers complex, expensive solutions re-purposed for SMBs. We want to be the go-to solution for the SMB market.”

Agentz Joins the Network Solutions Marketplace
“Chatbot solutions are becoming the go-to technology for businesses seeking to provide more responsive support to website visitors and existing customers. By establishing additional communication channels, customers that may have once been lost can be more easily captured and either gained or retained,” says Steve VeZain, Director of Acquisition Marketing at Network Solutions. “Including the Agentz digital receptionist in our Partner Offers marketplace is a natural extension of ensuring that Network Solutions’ customers have access to the most comprehensive solutions to continue to grow their business.”

You can try out the Agentz Digital Receptionist starting today with a 30-day free trial courtesy of Network Solutions.

*Study by Lead Connect

Images: Shutterstock